Identify EC2 Windows instances - Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
Inspect the instance identity documentInspect the system UUIDInspect the system virtual machine generation identifier
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Identify EC2 Windows instances

You might need to determine whether your application is running on an EC2 instance.

For information about identifying Linux instances, see Identify EC2 Linux instances in the Amazon EC2 User Guide for Linux Instances.

Inspect the instance identity document

For a definitive and cryptographically verified method of identifying an EC2 instance, check the instance identity document, including its signature. These documents are available on every EC2 instance at the local, non-routable address http://169.254.169.254/latest/dynamic/instance-identity/. For more information, see Instance identity documents.

Inspect the system UUID

You can get the system UUID and look for the presence of the characters "EC2" in the beginning octet of the UUID. This method to determine whether a system is an EC2 instance is quick but potentially inaccurate because there is a small chance that a system that is not an EC2 instance could have a UUID that starts with these characters. Furthermore, EC2 instances using SMBIOS 2.4 might represent the UUID in little-endian format, therefore the "EC2" characters do not appear at the beginning of the UUID.

Example : Get the UUID using WMI or Windows PowerShell

Use the Windows Management Instrumentation command line (WMIC) as follows:

wmic path win32_computersystemproduct get uuid

Alternatively, if you're using Windows PowerShell, use the Get-WmiObject cmdlet as follows:

PS C:\> Get-WmiObject -query "select uuid from Win32_ComputerSystemProduct" | Select UUID

In the following example output, the UUID starts with "EC2", which indicates that the system is probably an EC2 instance.

EC2AE145-D1DC-13B2-94ED-012345ABCDEF

For instances using SMBIOS 2.4, the UUID might be represented in little-endian format; for example:

45E12AEC-DCD1-B213-94ED-012345ABCDEF

Inspect the system virtual machine generation identifier

A virtual machine generation identifier consists of a unique buffer of 128-bit interpreted as cryptographic random integer identifier. You can retrieve the virtual machine generation identifier to identify your Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud instance. The generation identifier is exposed within the guest operating system of the instance through an ACPI table entry. The value will change if your machine is cloned, copied, or imported into Amazon, such as with VM Import/Export.

Example : Retrieve the virtual machine generation identifier from Windows

You can create a sample application to retrieve the virtual machine generation identifier from your instances running Windows. For more information, see Obtaining the virtual machine generation identifier in the Microsoft documentation.